Will County Democratic Central Committee - News

Published on Friday, September 2, 2016

Memo to GOP: Forget your obstructionist policies. They backfired

What I would expect from someone of Korologos’s character — and that of Allen — is a list of ways to recapture for the GOP its identity as a conservative, problem-solving party: how to find common ground that solves pressing national problems and does not violate fundamental principles; how to compromise in ways that will move the country away from its precarious position — in a political system now caught in the cross hairs of tribal partisan warfare, stuck in obstructionist limbo, and facing growing racial and ethnic tension.

What we got was something else. The core of their advice to Republican lawmakers was to double down on the obstructionist approaches that have defined the Obama years, and to do the same with the kind of “gotcha” investigations that delegitimize a president and Washington politics, while using delay tactics and filibusters to block Clinton Supreme Court nominees.

We know that Republican congressional leaders, on the night of President Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, chose a deliberate policy of uniting in opposition to all of his initiatives, even before he served a full day in office. Now we have a pair of blue-ribbon establishment Republicans fundamentally suggesting the same approach — one that has contributed to the decline of the Republican brand, the rise of Donald Trump, the weakening of GOP leadership and the growth of know-nothing radical anti-government sentiment — months before the election of a president.